The afternoon runs quickly, and soon it’s time for the most known of the temples, Angkor Wat…
Of course being on all the postcards in the world it is a sort of anticlimax (the “deja-vu” effect), but there is always space for exploring… like climbing a neck-breaking staircase on all fours & looking at the people from up there..
And in a corner of the uppermost cell, an unusual encounter, my reward for the climbing: an old monk, completely hairless and toothless, who has retired to “feel the voice of the world fade” after a life as civil servant. He complains of not being very good in English, and when I speak to him in French he answers fluently in the most perfect and sweetly pronounced French that has ever sounded in SouthEast Asia…Knowing that during the Khmer rouge all people who knew a foreign language were killed (as well as all the teachers, the bespectacled people, the entrepreneurs, etc etc .banghead: ), I feel I understand more deeply his serene and fix stare, his sweetness and gentleness.
Dusk descends on the monuments, EuroGF and I return to the blazing lights of a would-be economic miracle city, the long strip of bars & restaurants that cuts in half Siem Reap.
Late in the evening, sitting in the Barrio restaurant in front of a beef lok lak (the “khmer Burger”, ads they say
), I half close my eyes and still see the old man in his orange robe kneeling in front of a Buddha’s statue and offering me an incense stick…..